prometheus/tsdb/docs/format/wal.md

WAL Disk Format

The write ahead log operates in segments that are numbered and sequential, e.g. 000000, 000001, 000002, etc., and are limited to 128MB by default. A segment is written to in pages of 32KB. Only the last page of the most recent segment may be partial. A WAL record is an opaque byte slice that gets split up into sub-records should it exceed the remaining space of the current page. Records are never split across segment boundaries. If a single record exceeds the default segment size, a segment with a larger size will be created. The encoding of pages is largely borrowed from LevelDB's/RocksDB's write ahead log.

Notable deviations are that the record fragment is encoded as:

┌───────────┬──────────┬────────────┬──────────────┐
│ type <1b> │ len <2b> │ CRC32 <4b> │ data <bytes> │
└───────────┴──────────┴────────────┴──────────────┘

The type flag has the following states:

• 0: rest of page will be empty
• 1: a full record encoded in a single fragment
• 2: first fragment of a record
• 3: middle fragment of a record
• 4: final fragment of a record

Record encoding

The records written to the write ahead log are encoded as follows:

Series records

Series records encode the labels that identifies a series and its unique ID.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ type = 1 <1b>                              │
├────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ ┌─────────┬──────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ id <8b> │ n = len(labels) <uvarint>    │ │
│ ├─────────┴────────────┬─────────────────┤ │
│ │ len(str_1) <uvarint> │ str_1 <bytes>   │ │
│ ├──────────────────────┴─────────────────┤ │
│ │  ...                                   │ │
│ ├───────────────────────┬────────────────┤ │
│ │ len(str_2n) <uvarint> │ str_2n <bytes> │ │
│ └───────────────────────┴────────────────┘ │
│                  . . .                     │
└────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Sample records

Sample records encode samples as a list of triples (series_id, timestamp, value). Series reference and timestamp are encoded as deltas w.r.t the first sample. The first row stores the starting id and the starting timestamp. The first sample record begins at the second row.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ type = 2 <1b>                                                    │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ ┌────────────────────┬───────────────────────────┐               │
│ │ id <8b>            │ timestamp <8b>            │               │
│ └────────────────────┴───────────────────────────┘               │
│ ┌────────────────────┬───────────────────────────┬─────────────┐ │
│ │ id_delta <uvarint> │ timestamp_delta <uvarint> │ value <8b>  │ │
│ └────────────────────┴───────────────────────────┴─────────────┘ │
│                              . . .                               │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Tombstone records

Tombstone records encode tombstones as a list of triples (series_id, min_time, max_time) and specify an interval for which samples of a series got deleted.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ type = 3 <1b>                                       │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ ┌─────────┬───────────────────┬───────────────────┐ │
│ │ id <8b> │ min_time <varint> │ max_time <varint> │ │
│ └─────────┴───────────────────┴───────────────────┘ │
│                        . . .                        │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘